NPCs
Customers Customers are NPCs that appear in your parking lot in a car or a van. Customers enter your store, walk around, select merchandise and check out before leaving your store. They then return to their vehicles and leave the parking lot to make room for the next vehicle. Customers have yellow skin, black legs, a variety of torso colours and a random avatar face. Some customers cannot afford higher priced items. Some customers are set to look for a certain item. Sometimes customers leave a store without making a purchase. There could be different reasons for that: they may have not found the item they set out to look for. The checkout lines may have been too long and the customers lose patience waiting in line to make a purchase. One type of customer wears a high hat and is richer than the average customer. If he enters your store **andnoticehowtherichguyisamale!**, he is more likely to buy higher priced items and also tends to buy more items. Workers Workers are NPCs that can be hired to help with your store. You can find workers in the fourth tab on the left on your screen. There are 5 different types of workers: cashiers, janitors, restockers, managers and a guard. You choose the category and how many Workers you would like to hire - up to 20 of each category. The only exception is the guard - you can only hire one of them. Just ensure that you can afford all your workers before hiring them! To make an initial hire, you pay 10 mins. worth of a worker's pay. After that you pay the worker ongoing a set pay rate - see the following chart for details. Workers are easily identified as they wear the same colour shirt as your personalizable store colour. Your store logo is also placed at top left on their shirts. And they keep a ROBLOX Smile on their face. Cashier Hire a cashier to help you man a register. Reminder: self checkouts do not require any cashiers. Don't be paying if you don't have to! Janitor Janitors take care of spills. They cruise your store until they find a spill which they then clean with their mob. Janitors are not that fast, so if your store gets too messy, stop for a minute to manually clean it - and boost your rating! Restocker Restockers work hand in hand with the manager to get your display items restocked. A restocker gets supplies from the storage units to the corresponding display items. They restock to maximum capacity. Once your store gets too large and it becomes too much work to manually maintain it, a restocker is a great addition to your store team. Manager Managers are responsible for ordering merchandise. They use your funds to order supplies that is added to your storage units until a restocker distributes it to the correct display items. You manually have to set the reorder value for each supply item before the manager can get to work. Start by choosing one item in supply, check the little box, then add the value that you would like to have reordered by the minute. The manager sits at an office desk. So remember to purchase & place the desk prior to hiring a manager. You only ever need one manager, but you have the option to hire more. Managers are another great help for larger stores that can afford to hire them. Guard Hire a guard to catch robbers. You can only hire one guard for your store so you need to pitch in catching some robbers yourself once your store is on the larger side. Or deal with the loss of earnings if the robbers succeed with the theft of your goods. Robbers Robbers try and steal supply items from your store. You can recognize them by the grey beanies & shirts, and pants that they wear. When robbers appear in the parking lot on their way to enter your store, the following message appears near the top of your screen: "A suspicious individual is approaching your store! Click on the robber to apprehend him." Click on the robber repeatedly to stop him. You know you caught the robber when the robber raises both arms in the air. The robber will then vanish. Fail to catch a robber and the robber will take some of your supply items without paying - and you end up making a loss. Same as customers, robbers can also comment on your store. Here's some tips: * Customers can make a mess in your store. They may spill something on the floor which you should clean up by repeatedly clicking on the spill. Or hire a janitor to take care of the spills. Watch those ratings as spills affect your ratings if not taken care of. * Customers tend to judge your store by making visible comments - some comments are positive, others are negative. These comments can give you an indication on what needs improving in your store. However, some customers may comment negatively no matter what (just like in real life ;-)) so trying to keep up with improving your store right away based on each customer comment might be a challenge. Best thing is not to try and worry about fixing everything at once but instead to have a "we are working on it" attitude. That way you can improve your store as you can afford it and not because some customers are demanding. Inexperienced players are more likely to face this challenge as they may feel that they have to comply to all the customers right away to create a great store. Relax - view the game as a process and not a race - and enjoy! * A manager's office desk does not have to be positioned within your retail area. It just needs to be accessible for the manager. * Sometimes a manager does not seem to make an attempt to get to his or her office desk. If that happens check for obstructions such as decorations or display items near the desk. Try and create more of a clearance and move those items a little bit further away from the office desk. You can also try rotating the desk to face a different direction. * Consider keeping storage units more central to reduce the path of the restocker(s). That way you may need less restockers overall - and reduce overheads. * When hiring workers consider starting with a lower amount to see if they can keep up with the work. If they cannot keep up, add more workers. This way you keep your expenses in check.